1- Introduction
2- Literature review and hypotheses development
3- Samples and measures
4- Empirical results
5- Discussion
References
Introduction
In order to get rid of the fetter of the old technology and technology lock-in, the enterprises have to forget outdated knowledge and abandon the established thoughts and core rigidity. Organizational forgetting is a way for an enterprise to discard its obsolete knowledge and call into question its pre-established beliefs in order to adapt to various environmental changes (Anand et al., 1998). It can abandon some of the existing organizational inertia, and provide new cognitive space for innovation and, therefore, generate new knowledge in the organization to be recognized and nurtured, and, subsequently, inspire innovation. The complexity of the external environment causes a business, which does not forget outdated practices, to lose dynamism needed to remain vibrant and competitive. As an example, Kodak was bankrupt, partially because of sticking to the perception of its superiority in the conventional photo making industry at a time when the digital technology was developing and undergoing maturity day by day. It seems well accepted that, organizational forgetting may lead to the ability of an enterprise to innovate and may even directly impact the firm’s survival. However, most existing literatures about organizational forgetting are limited to theoretical discussion, much of the work has focused on the description or conceptual model rather than the impact of organizational forgetting on enterprise management and innovation. A reasonable theoretical framework and more empirical tests in needed to provide evidence. Literature also shows that changing attitudes and conventions does not always lead to the successful development of new products because organizational forgetting process takes up time and consumes limited resources. It is noted that the change in the values or project routines without careful assessment may weaken the team's development ability (Akgun et al., 2006 ). In fact, changes in values and conventions will not have any impact on organizational operation and organizational performance, unless such changes are really applied. If the organization lacks the necessary skills, intentional organizational forgetting is incomplete and will result in ineffective functioning of the team. In this sense, the organizational forgetting does not necessarily lead to successful development, the development team also needs the ability to actually apply this change into the project development process. However, existing literature does not give a clear explanation for this ability. Organizational knowledge-base is adjusted by devaluation of knowledge (forgetting) and adding new knowledge (absorption) to achieve a new dynamic balance. Hence, it is necessary and an extension of natural logic to construct an analysis based on such interactive process in order to answer the intrinsic mechanism of organizational forgetting on innovation. Absorption capacity is considered to include identifying, assimilating, and integrating new knowledge; it is a dynamic process capability. Organizational forgetting has an impact on knowledge cognition, conversion and integration approach in the process of innovation. Therefore, this study believes that absorptive capacity may be the important explanatory variables with respect to organizational forgetting and innovation. Although prior researches have mentioned that organizational forgetting may correlate with absorptive capacity (Gabriel et al.,2012; Jin et al.,2009), there is practically no empirical evidence in this regard. In addition, environmental contingency theory suggests that influence of environmental contexts should be considered to enhance the predictive powers of research (Barney et al. 2011).